Michael Beer

Updated at: May 21, 2007, 2:06 a.m.

Michael Beer is currently Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and Chairman of the Center for Organizational Fitness. His teaching, research and consulting activities have been in the areas of organizational effectiveness, change, and human resource management. Before joining the faculty ofthe Harvard Business School, Mike founded and served as Director of the Organizational Research and Development Department at Corning Inc. The department was an internal consulting and research group that successfully helped Corning's managers make a number of significant innovations in organizing and managing at the corporate and business unit level.

Mike has written numerous book chapters and articles in academic and business journals, and authored or co-authored eight books. His most recent book, edited with Nitin Nohria, is Breaking the Code of Change. His previous book The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, published in 1990, won the Johnson, Smith & Knisely Award for the best book on executive leadership that year, and was a finalist for the Academy of Management's Terry Book Award. Professor Beer presently teaches in the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School, and is chair of Strategic Human Resource Management, an educational program for senior human resource executives. He has taught in several other executive programs at HBS, including the Advanced Management Program, the International Senior Management Program, and Managing Change, which he founded and chaired. In the early 1980s Mike led the development of the first required course in human resource management ever taught at a business School. This led to Managing Human Assets, the first book to frame human resource management as a general management responsibility. Professor Beer has also taught Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Decision Making and Ethical Values in the first year curriculum. Mike Beer's current research deals with how corporate leaders go about aligning their organization and its culture with strategy and values defined by them.

Professor Beer is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the National Academy of Human Resources, the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the Division of General Psychology of the American Psychological Association. His professional activities have included membership on the editorial boards of several journals, membership on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management.

Mike was a member of the Board of Directors of GTECH Corporation and he recently founded, with Russ Eisenstat, the Center for Organizational Fitness. The Center works with senior management teams to enable a strategic change process based on fifteen years of research and practice.

Mike has consulted with manufacturing, financial service, retail and professional service firms including Merck, Hewlett Packard, Agilent Technologies, Becton Dickinson, Landmark Communications, IBM, Honeywell, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Owens-Illinois, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ernst and Young, Deloitte & Touche, Smith & Nephew PLC, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, and Goldberg PLC., and Whitbread PLC. He has spoken or taught in many corporate management programs.